EPILOGUE
The fire pit was cold. A column of impenetrable darkness loomed over it and the boy in the night, unmistakable from the backdrop of lesser darknesses outlined in a shimmer of starlight. He’d come to see the last ritual performed. The woods were his home, and, without flashlight, familiar steps and handholds had guided him down into the valley, stiff-limbed but sure.
The boy climbed the Big Tree alone like that.
He perched above. The full moon hadn’t yet revealed itself. Sightlessness gave a spherical shape to the cricket chatter, the illusion of being at the center of the universe, as if he were that center and the Big Tree’s limbs creaked his name.
Dead Man Walker, they’d called him. The boy wasn’t dead, wasn’t a man (yet). He’d run, a great distance in record time. He was tired.
To stand against the oncoming wind, the boy would need strength, more to walk the bough and set things right. Until then, he huddled, eyes closed. Or were they? Such little difference, anymore, he being too weak to discern if only in his mind’s eye a camera pulled back from him and everything—a boy in the woods, as if made of woods and the woods were him all the same, as if written by god because what he saw was all-known, watched from above in the guise of a wide-eyed moon.
Below, doubt stretched in long shadows. The world wasn’t a better place. The Work had amounted to what it was—another human endeavor. Not even in the sacred Grove …
Where Erika Summerson was. Cross-legged at the foot of his hospital bed. No longer. Never again. At the end of the high bough, the girl’s specter smiled, kind and big-hearted, where she’d risen months ago.
The boy’s head ached. He couldn’t remember when last he ate.
He thought about failure, redemption. About what the dead leave behind. Stories making stories.
He was too high to come down.
The canopy rustled, dropped a lunar spotlight, and a hundred billion fans cheered as Walker tottered up to the plate. Or was it crickets, again? Or his friends, fearless at last and rushing back to him? Or the tormentor skulking for corpses like a carrion bird? Or the town seeking him and answers and unable to discern the difference?
A sacrifice fly was easy if a guy had the guts to take a loss. A clean miracle was better—to fall like an eclipse over the woods, make them vanish to fools and fanatics as if they’d never existed. By not existing. He’d wanted to free others, not make them more lost. Best to keep the lesson of the woods kindling in those with the potential to be more than just potential for when the big game comes.
Expire in a hospital bed? Nah.
John swung hard and ran like hell.
The last play of the last inning of his last game on Earth. The boy left the field. He soared over the moon, over the fences of both worlds. He went back, back, way back beyond the stars. All the way.
Into that Good Night Page 30